PESHAWAR: The provincial government has pledged an amount of Rs3.7 billion to rebuild as many as 760 schools destroyed in the 2005 devastating earthquake in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Azad Kashmir.

A spokesman of elementary and secondary education department said in a statement here on Thursday that the government promised the huge allocation despite the fact that reconstruction of those schools was responsibility of the federal government He said that the earthquake caused large scale devastation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Azad Kashmir. Educational institutions were also destroyed in the earthquake 10 years ago.

The spokesman said that accordingly a strategy was developed to reconstruct the damaged schools. `Out of total 3,669 destroyed schools, the number of ERRA`s earthquake strategy schools is 2,909 and non-strategy school is around 760,` he added.

The spokesman said that 2,909 schools were included in the ERRA`s strategy out of which construction of 1,557 was completed and that of 1,352 was in progress.

It merits a mention here that prime minister had announced an amount of Rs4 billion for the purpose but it t has not been released to ERRA so far.

For the earthquake non-strategy schools, the spokesman said, elementary and secondary education department formulated an ADP scheme `reconstruction of 760 non-strategy earthquake affected schools` at a total cost of Rs3700 million and the DDWP approved 320 PC-Is in that respect.